The present invention relates to an image display system and, more particularly, to an image display system which displays part of a large sized image on a display unit and which displays a subimage area of the large sized image by scrolling the displayed area.
It is generally difficult to simultaneously and accurately display a large sized image, such as the image of an entire imagery, over a wide range indicating the surface profile of the earth to be transmitted from an artificial satellite on an ordinary display monitor device such as a cathode-ray tube (CRT) having a limited display area, a limited horizontal scanning line number and limited resolution. Therefore, it is commonly considered that different partial image areas of a large sized image are displayed respectively, by using a plurality of display monitor units, and the entire image is conveniently and finally obtained by combining these partial images. However, the overall constitution of such an image display system would be undesirable complicated.
As a general method of solving such a problem, a partial image of the large sized image is displayed on the CRT display, and by moving the screen, i.e., by scrolling this partial image, a desired partial image area of the large sized image may be displayed. However, in the prior art, the image signal in the area which has been once dislocated from an image memory such as a refresh memory for storing the image information corresponding to the partial image to be displayed on the CRT will have immediately disappeared. In other words, once the partial image in the image to be displayed on the CRT has been out of the display area and has disappeared from the image memory by the scrolling operation, it is difficult to immediately recall this vanished image area. The use of a memory with large capacity allows the image area which has disappeared from the CRT display to remain stored in the image memory, thereby preventing this image area information from disappearing from the image memory. However, an increase in the capacity of the image memory causes a reduction in the readout speed of memory information. Thus, the scroll speed will be reduced, resulting in prevention of the prompt display of a desired partial image on the CRT display. Therefore, according to the prior-art image display system, it is extremely difficult to effectively scroll the display-enabling area of the display in the large sized image at a higher rate of speed in any desired direction.